Did you know that your body only has one mechanism to lower blood sugar, other than exercise?
Insulin.
But what happens when that one mechanism begins to fail?
In today’s blog, we’re going to unpack the concept of insulin resistance. I believe it is one of the most important and critical topics in all of medicine for the next 20 years.
In fact, I would go so far as to call optimizing blood sugar the holy grail of health.
Most people think you just wake up one day with diabetes. This is just not the case.
Diabetes is actually a continuum or spectrum. This means that you become diabetic over the course of five, ten, or fifteen years.
The spectrum begins with mild insulin resistance that progresses to a blood sugar of 126, or seven teaspoons of sugar in your bloodstream — just two teaspoons of sugar above a non-diabetic.
In order to understand insulin resistance, we first need to answer some critical questions.
Blood sugar is a mechanism by which we deliver fuel or energy to our body so that we achieve the primary goal of all living things, which is to stay alive.
Blood sugar is energy.
It’s a big deal because sugar is the simplest, most readily available form of energy that our body uses to keep us alive.
Once our blood sugar hits a level of 100, or five teaspoons of sugar, the body begins to store the rest as fuel for later. This accomplishes two things: It helps us to survive famines in the future, and it also gets sugar out of our bloodstream before the amount reaches seven teaspoons, which is the level of diabetes. So, your body avoids wasting sugar while skirting a diabetic blood sugar level in the process by pushing all that excess sugar into fat.
One intermediate step is all it takes to collect sugar and drive it into a fat cell. This is hugely important.
In order to answer that, we need to understand “normal” first. In other words, what does our body normally do by design in the presence of elevated blood sugar? When your blood sugar rises above 100, a signal is immediately sent to your pancreas to release the hormone insulin.
Insulin does two things — it lowers blood sugar by driving it into the cells, and it converts sugar into fat.
So as blood sugar normalizes, the insulin goes away entirely. Then you have this relationship in a normal scenario: sugar rises, insulin rises, sugar falls, then insulin falls.
This is normal.
Over time, as blood sugar remains elevated even in the presence of insulin, the body releases even more insulin to correct the high blood sugar, and then your blood sugar drops. But our body starts resisting insulin, which results in chronically elevated blood sugar.
This is the basic premise of insulin resistance.
But why is this a big deal?
Insulin resistance is a chronic progressive disease, which means if left alone, it not only doesn’t go away, it also gets worse. And eventually, our blood sugar becomes so elevated that we are diagnosed with diabetes.
This is how tightly our body controls blood sugar. It’s super important to be alive but we want no extra because we don’t want diabetes.
You are profoundly insulin resistant with diabetes as opposed to mildly insulin resistant with pre-diabetes.
An out-of-control diabetic is also insulin resistant, they’re just out of control. They have an inability to respond to any level of insulin that their body is able to produce...
